Movie collecting 2.1 (update!)
Ever since I resumed my movie collecting hobby, I've been occasionally improving the Movie collection -app I made. The movie collection itself has also grown considerably, perhaps worryingly so... 😅 Read on to find out more!
At the end of last year, I implemented a simple tagging system where each movie can be given tags. Those tags can be searched for, and I'm mainly using them to categorize my boutique label purchases. With the tags I can easily see my entire collection of, say, Arrow Video releases. I also use tags to mark some distinct release features like a slipcover or steelbook. Previously I was (ab)using the description field for these kind of things, but the tags make it much more convenient. And nicer, with those nifty colors! 🙂
The tags are hidden behind the tag-symbol on the main listing by default, and can be opened with a click. Clicking on a tag will show all movies tagged with it.
Tags could also be used to do genre categories, — I intentionally don't have a genre field stored for the movies — but I don't see myself needing the genre information anyway. And if I did, I'd add it as a field and do some IMDb-lookups and assign them automatically. Genre information might come in handy for statistics purposes, though.
Speaking of statistics: I've also revamped the Collection statistics-page with much nicer card-based layout and more of interesting (well, to me anyway!) stats. New stats include:
- Monthly purchases / watches per year: shows the monthly sums for both purchases and movie watches in color-coded blocks, divided into yearly buckets. Starting from 2022, because that's when I resumed the hobby and started tracking these again.
- Looking at the picture below, I must admit, these numbers do scare me slightly! I knew I bought a few movies last year, but was not expecting this... 😱💸
- I was meaning to add monthly costs to those blocks, but didn't quite find the courage to do it, yet. Perhaps the costs could be hidden by default, hmm.. 🤔
- Most watched movies (TOP 30), Foreign Regions and Duplicates: tabbed listings of the TOP 30 most watched titles, releases of foreign regions (non-European region locked discs) and duplicates (mainly releases in different formats).
- TV-series: titles that are TV-series (season releases or the whole series) are marked as such and excluded from most of the stats. E.g. separate TV-seasons will skew the production year counts, running time averages etc., so I've left them out from calculations.
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In addition to the above, I've also improved the backend code: cleaner TypeScript, switch from CommonJS modules to ESM, more robust data scraping for the EAN-barcode scanning and better automatic backups. Among other tweaks. I'm also making more steps towards client side rendering; for example the tags are fully handled in client side with the backend only supplying the tags JSON.
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PS. A tiny bit of absolutely useless trivia: this blog post was authored in Markdown instead of typing in HTML. I improved my trusty old static site generator to support .md-input files. Not that you can see the difference in the final output, but it does make typing these posts slightly nicer for me. You just gotta take my word for it! 😄 (Shout-out to Markdig / .NET Markdown processor — bolted that onto my generator and with trivial amount of additional work I was good to go. Nice!)
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